Home for the Holidays

A family film. Claudia loses her job. The same day she is let go from a restoration post at a museum, her daughter tells her she will not be home for the holiday, and she gets on a plane to her parents. The house is in Baltimore. The mother and father have aged; the mother talks without stopping, the father watches the game, and both put their questions about her life in turn. Her brother Tommy arrives. Loud, mocking, with someone they do not know; he likes to provoke everybody. Her sister Joanne comes too: orderly, angry, and not fond of the rest of the family. From there the film covers one day, the Thanksgiving dinner. The table is laid, the talking starts, and past a certain point it comes apart. What the narrative is interested in is not the meal but inevitability: these people did not choose each other and have to be shut in one room once a year; the film shows that as neither tragedy nor celebration. What it is good at is detail: an aunt's insistence, old home movies, a sentence said in the kitchen and a quarrel nobody remembers. Holly Hunter plays Claudia, Robert Downey Jr. plays Tommy, Anne Bancroft the mother and Charles Durning the father. Dylan McDermott and Cynthia Stevenson are in the cast. Jodie Foster directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes family-gathering films and comedy that leans on performance. Who it is not for: anyone looking for an orderly plot; the narrative is scattered and deliberately reaches no conclusion.